Forum Discussion
Site columns not inheriting from Content Type Hub
Sam_C1610 The content type hub allows you to share Content Types across your tenant. Since a content type can have columns, the only way you can share columns is when they are used in a Content Type. Columns are not "pushed" to your sites on their own. See: Publish a content type from a content publishing hub - Microsoft Support. You can, however, share column values by creating term sets (managed metadata values) at the "root" of your tenant and then in each site, pointing site columns to those term sets. The link you are referencing is a little misleading. It's not technically inaccurate, but it doesn't provide the entire story.
Sam_C1610 The content type hub allows you to share Content Types across your tenant. Since a content type can have columns, the only way you can share columns is when they are used in a Content Type. Columns are not "pushed" to your sites on their own. See: Publish a content type from a content publishing hub - Microsoft Support. You can, however, share column values by creating term sets (managed metadata values) at the "root" of your tenant and then in each site, pointing site columns to those term sets. The link you are referencing is a little misleading. It's not technically inaccurate, but it doesn't provide the entire story.
- Thanks Susan, that's really helpful, and what I feared!
I should probably have described the wider picture of what I'm trying to do: I want to extend every 'Site Pages' document library within the tenant to have some common columns such as "review date" and "review schedule". I thought at first I'd just create these as shared columns within the Content Type Hub.
However, if I have to add to a content type (I've made one called "Org Site Page", inheriting from "Site Page"), how can I make this what's created whenever someone wants to add a new page to a site? I can see that it's not just looking at the default for the library as this is still set to the "Wiki Page" content type.- You could make your page the default template for a page (assuming that you ALSO create a page template using that content type). Content Types and column values are "sticky" in page templates so that may be the easiest way to get your outcome. But you would need to provision this with a site design or script as part of your site provisioning process.
Susan_Hanley sorry it's taken so long to reply - I've only just got around to spending some time on this again today.
Having added the new "Org Site Page" content type to the site, I've now managed to create a template of that type (using https://www.sharepointdiary.com/2018/02/sharepoint-online-change-content-type-using-powershell.html to update the type of the template). And, you're right, setting that as the default for the site (using https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/page-templates-in-sharepoint-faa92408-0c84-4e3d-8460-3c28065e7873) means all new pages (unless the user really tries to do something else) will be of the Org Site Page type.
However, when I used the Highlighted Content Web Part (HCWP) with "The page library on this site" as the source and "Page" as the type, it does not allow me add a filter (using "Page properties" on the initial dropdown) on the properties that are attached to my new Org Site Page type, despite reindexing the Site Pages library. I wonder whether it's hard-coded to only see those that are attached directly to the Site Page content type. Is there a way to add them to that list?
I know there's a way around this by using the HCWP with "This site" as the source and "All" as the document type alongside adding the properties to Managed Properties (as per https://sharepointmaven.com/how-to-create-a-managed-property-in-sharepoint-online/ but this is very difficult to teach non-technical users. Any ideas?
Sam
